Team feedback ideas

There are many ways in which you can feedback the Belbin Team Role reports to a team. Here are some of our suggestions that we hope you find useful.

Suggestion 1 – The Team Role Circle

Objective: To share preferred Team Roles within the team and highlight potential strengths and weaknesses. By the end of the session the team will have a clearer insight into both individual and collective contributions, leading to more productive working.

Method: How you run this session will depend on the number of participants, whether they are a team, or whether they are from different departments or organisations.

If it is a working team, it may be best not to split it up, unless it is a large team which naturally breaks into smaller sub-teams. Otherwise, divide participants into “teams” of approximately five or six.

Ask each team to draw the Team Role Circle on a flipchart and to enter their names in the segments which correspond to their top two Team Roles.

Participants should use their top two Team Roles as highlighted on the Team Role Overview page of their report.

Once names have been entered, encourage discussion and analysis of the findings. Using their newly-acquired knowledge of Team Roles, ask participants to come up with a list of five strengths of the team, and five possible weaknesses. This may include statements such as: “We have three Teamworkers and no Shapers. This means that we are at risk of losing direction and focus. However, the atmosphere within the team is likely to be very supportive.”

On completion of this exercise, ask participants to come up with 3 action points, based on their discussions, which will enable the team to increase its effectiveness.

(If you want the team, or teams, to see how well team-members work together on a task, this would be a good time to introduce an exercise or game. The Belbin exercises, Contribute and Co-operate, have been designed to assist with team learning).

Suggestion 2 – Project Stages

The session was very good – I let them read their reports and then asked them to do a team activity. They are just starting work on a big project so I used the activity ‘Project Stages’ from your website. I got some additional information from the department manager to make it more tangible and got them to focus on key stages of the project that’s coming up and asked them to identify which team roles they would utilise for each phase. They found it very useful and the outputs were great.

Objective: For the team to understand how to use each others strengths effectively when working on a project. This leads to more efficient and effective project working/management.

Method: Ask the participants to think of a real or imaginary project and to agree the stages that the project will follow, step by step. For example:

A problem was identified

Various approaches/solutions were put forth

Ideas discussed – best one agreed on

The idea was outsourced to check viability

A plan was put in place

Participants then discuss which Team Role(s) would be useful at each stage of the project, and which would be unhelpful (e.g. Plants and Resource Investigators for ideas, Co-ordinators and Implementers for organising people and work, Monitor Evaluators for strategic decision-making etc.).

If appropriate, encourage a discussion which leads to understanding as to why some past projects succeeded, whilst others failed.

Once the Belbin reports have been explained and handed back to the individuals, they could repeat the process, but this time replacing the useful Team Role with their name. This gives a great template for the team to use in the future.

More Ideas

There are useful discussions regarding ways to feedback to a team on our Culture Counts LinkedIn group. Please ‘link in’ and join in the conversations!